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Lot Essay
Painted in 1994, the present work stems from Leon Kossoff’s celebrated series depicting Christ Church, Spitalfields. Emerging from extraordinary swathes of marbled impasto, the building towers above the viewer, illuminated against stormy clouds. Figures pass by on the streets below, dwarfed by its anthropomorphic presence. Located near the artist’s childhood home in East London, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Georgian Baroque church became one of Kossoff’s most important subjects. Beginning in 1987, he captured its vertiginous form across the seasons, depicting it in paint and on paper in changing light and weather conditions. The series marked the culmination of a decades-long love letter to London, taking its place alongside Kossoff’s portraits of stations, swimming pools and local neighbourhoods. The present work was included in his exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1995, followed by his major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996; it was acquired by the Peter Simon Collection that year.
Kossoff was born in Shoreditch, where his parents ran a bakery. He had long been fascinated by the church’s imposing form. ‘It seems to move into space like a great monument,’ he explained. ‘When you look at the Christ Church a whole new world of space is opening up. You experience space and light that you hadn’t before, that is what painting is all about. Space and light occupied by human presence’ (in conversation with N. Cass and J. Snow, Channel Four News, 2007). After years of neglect and threats of demolition, the church began to host the Spitalfields Music Festival in 1976, raising funds that went towards its restoration. One day, while walking down Brick Lane, Kossoff saw it anew. It was, he recalled, a building which ‘has always been part of my life and, in the dusty sunlight of that August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of Blake’s Jerusalem, I find myself involved once again in making drawings and the idea for a painting begins to emerge’ (‘Nothing is ever the same’, in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., XLVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1995, p. 25).
Kossoff had been evacuated from London during the Second World War. When he returned, he began to study with David Bomberg, who famously encouraged his pupils to seek out ‘the spirit in the mass’. Together with fellow student Frank Auerbach, Kossoff began to apply these teachings to his local surroundings. His works did not seek to capture the precise likeness of their subjects, but rather to preserve a sense of their living presence. Typically starting with drawing before moving on to board, Kossoff would build his works from thick layers of paint, scraping and reapplying it with a knife. ‘The subject, person or landscape, reverberate, in my head unleashing a compelling need to destroy and restate,’ he explained; ‘… painting is a deepening of this process until, moved by unpremeditated visual excitement, the painting, like a flame, flares up in spite of oneself, and, when the sparks begin to fly, you let it be’ (quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1988, unpaged).
Throughout his oeuvre, Kossoff returned obsessively to the same haunts: among them Mornington Crescent, the disused railway lands behind King’s Cross, St Paul’s, Kilburn and Willesden, where he lived and worked from 1966 onwards. ‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream,’ he asserted. ‘It’s always moving—the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life’ (quoted in Leon Kossoff, op. cit., 1996, p. 36). His recurring visions of Christ Church prompt comparison with Claude Monet’s depictions of Rouen Cathedral, or John Constable’s paintings of Salisbury Cathedral. Yet Kossoff, who had come of age in a city destroyed by war, was deeply conscious of the fleeting impermanence of his subject. ‘The urgency that drives me to work is not only to do with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject on this particular day,’ he explained, ‘but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be dwarfed by more looming office blocks and overshadowed, the character of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building’ (‘Nothing is ever the same’, op. cit.).
Kossoff was born in Shoreditch, where his parents ran a bakery. He had long been fascinated by the church’s imposing form. ‘It seems to move into space like a great monument,’ he explained. ‘When you look at the Christ Church a whole new world of space is opening up. You experience space and light that you hadn’t before, that is what painting is all about. Space and light occupied by human presence’ (in conversation with N. Cass and J. Snow, Channel Four News, 2007). After years of neglect and threats of demolition, the church began to host the Spitalfields Music Festival in 1976, raising funds that went towards its restoration. One day, while walking down Brick Lane, Kossoff saw it anew. It was, he recalled, a building which ‘has always been part of my life and, in the dusty sunlight of that August day, when this part of London still looks and feels like the London of Blake’s Jerusalem, I find myself involved once again in making drawings and the idea for a painting begins to emerge’ (‘Nothing is ever the same’, in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., XLVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1995, p. 25).
Kossoff had been evacuated from London during the Second World War. When he returned, he began to study with David Bomberg, who famously encouraged his pupils to seek out ‘the spirit in the mass’. Together with fellow student Frank Auerbach, Kossoff began to apply these teachings to his local surroundings. His works did not seek to capture the precise likeness of their subjects, but rather to preserve a sense of their living presence. Typically starting with drawing before moving on to board, Kossoff would build his works from thick layers of paint, scraping and reapplying it with a knife. ‘The subject, person or landscape, reverberate, in my head unleashing a compelling need to destroy and restate,’ he explained; ‘… painting is a deepening of this process until, moved by unpremeditated visual excitement, the painting, like a flame, flares up in spite of oneself, and, when the sparks begin to fly, you let it be’ (quoted in Leon Kossoff, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, 1988, unpaged).
Throughout his oeuvre, Kossoff returned obsessively to the same haunts: among them Mornington Crescent, the disused railway lands behind King’s Cross, St Paul’s, Kilburn and Willesden, where he lived and worked from 1966 onwards. ‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream,’ he asserted. ‘It’s always moving—the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life’ (quoted in Leon Kossoff, op. cit., 1996, p. 36). His recurring visions of Christ Church prompt comparison with Claude Monet’s depictions of Rouen Cathedral, or John Constable’s paintings of Salisbury Cathedral. Yet Kossoff, who had come of age in a city destroyed by war, was deeply conscious of the fleeting impermanence of his subject. ‘The urgency that drives me to work is not only to do with the pressures of the accumulation of memories and the unique quality of the subject on this particular day,’ he explained, ‘but also with the awareness that time is short, that soon the mass of this building will be dwarfed by more looming office blocks and overshadowed, the character of the building will be lost forever, for it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building’ (‘Nothing is ever the same’, op. cit.).